Change Your Brain Every Day - The E-Cigarette Epidemic: How Unhealthy is Vaping?

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

With the recent headlines of illnesses and deaths attributed to vaping and the CEO of Juul promptly resigning, the nation’s attention is focused on e-cigarettes. So what is vaping? And what exactly is the threat it poses to our youth? In the first episode of a series on vaping, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen describe the physiological issues associated with e-cigarettes, and why their marketing campaigns have become so problematic.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. I was thinking we're going to call this vampire week, but ultimately we're going to talk about vaping. But before we do, for those of you that are watching this on video, you notice I

like shaved all my hair off. And I just have to like tell the story that my wife is in love with two actors, Jason Statham and The Rock. So basically most of the actors I like that I love on screen are bald. Have no hair at all. Nothing. And so I went to the barber and I showed him a picture of Jason Statham and I said, make me look like him. Because when you go bald, it's just so irritating because hair just like sticks up everywhere. It's like I have none, but it's irritating irritating and so I've been saying I was going to do this for a year and so I showed him a picture you know he did all the things that he could do and then he gave me the mirror to look at and I'm like but I don't look like Jason Statham he said I look like the rock I can't pay you because I look like The Rock, not Jason Statham.

I just died. That was so funny. So anyways, a little glimpse into the neuroses of the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Yes, you'll get more of it because we're going to talk all about toxins and natural makeup. I'm going all natural and wearing a lot less makeup in general. So you're going to hear more about our neurotic stuff that we do at home as we go. But today, we're talking about vaping. We are. And the Brain Warriors Way podcast, we also have a new feature called Brain in the News. And we're going to do that in episode three. But there's so much in the news about vaping.

I woke up this morning and the CEO of Juul was fired. Am I supposed to feel bad? We've been talking about if I was an evil ruler, how would I create mental illness in America? Well, I would create vaping companies that basically market to children. Well, and they'd make things that taste good and look cool. And so there was a high school that my daughter used to go to before we started homeschooling. They did a locker search because it became such a problem. Like so many kids were doing it. They did a locker search. They were going to search everyone's lockers. So of course, what do the kids do? They go and they run and they get everything out of their lockers and all of the toilets

got stopped up because no one tried to flush them down the toilet. So, yeah, it's a big problem. So, humans will always invent ways to hurt themselves. Which is so weird, right? You would think self-preservation. And Joel, I think one of the reasons it got in trouble, it was really marketing vaping as a healthy form of smoking. And when you vape, you're not inhaling a lot of the tar and other carcinogenic things, you're just getting pure nicotine and heated up. And people don't understand that when you inhale fire or things that are really hot, what you're doing is you're damaging the very delicate,

thin layer in your lungs, those little air pockets called the alveoli, that then what you're doing is you're burning them up and you're making it harder to get oxygen into your body. And why do we need oxygen? It runs every cell in your body and your brain, 2% of your body's weight, but it uses 20% of the oxygen in your body. So we also need to talk about the illnesses and the deaths related to vaping that are becoming an epidemic. So there's nine deaths now, 530 illnesses, people who've become ill, who've gone into many in the ICU, they're on ventilators. And the question I have, because I used to work in the ICU with people with ventilators, what they were describing sounded

almost like pneumonia, right? So it sounded like some form of pneumonia. So my question is, was it like a type of aspiration pneumonia? Was it something, a bacterial thing that's in the vape? What's causing this? Well, so the theory, at least at the moment, especially with the flavored vaping, is that there's a vitamin E acetate byproduct that people were reacting to in a negative way. So almost like an aspiration ammonia then? I'm not sure.

But I actually did a show about 18 months ago with Dr. Oz for the Dr. Oz show, where he was vaping caffeine. And so it was really interesting because I scanned him while he was vaping caffeine. And what we showed is it literally activated his occipital lobes. So that's the visual cortex, which meant if on his set he saw one of the cute interns walk by, he'd be paying more attention to that. Well, let's just say he'd be more likely to. Let's not say he did or he will. Well, I don't know. Right.

But he could be. But he would be more likely to pay attention. But his frontal lobes dropped. That's not good. But his frontal lobes dropped, which means he's more likely to make a bad decision and perhaps lose half of his net worth and visit his children on the weekends. That's so awful. But what we saw is, so you're getting a high concentration of nicotine, or caffeine you know whatever it is your those wax pens or another thing whatever you're vaping and it's going to have a more powerful impact and that's one of the issues with marijuana today is it's not the same it's not your grandfather's marijuana but it's much more

potent and i just had a vision of a grandfather sitting right his rocking chair smoking pot but you know is my generation many of us are grandfathers my mother's generation right that really escalated the use of marijuana in this country. Right. And so there are a whole bunch of grandfathers out there smoking. So weird. Anyways, what can you take away from this? It's an epidemic.

It's killing people. It's been marketed as a lie that that vaping is a healthy form healthier form of smoking the incidence of stroke is the same in vaping vaping as it is in smoking that high doses of nicotine they're addictive it's going to take more and more to get the same response. It prematurely ages your brain. And your skin. And you want to be more thoughtful, more careful. And as I wrote about in Feel Better Fast and Make It Last, it's something that helps you feel good now, but not later. And ultimately, what brain warriors want is they want to feel good now and later. If you do something and it's going to make you feel better tomorrow, you want to do that today. So that's your frontal lobes teaching you to do things for now and later.

Well, and quite frankly, any company that markets something that they know is not good for you, and they lie about it, and they market it to children, I'm sorry, I have no empathy. Well, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo banned flavored e-cigarettes and vaping products across the state through an emergency executive action. So banned the sale of flavored e-cigarettes and vaping. Cuomo said that flavored products, including bubble gum flavor, are geared toward young people. And he also proposed legislation to halt ads aimed at young people. So the vaping companies are going to, you know, ultimately because of the illness that it's causing,

there are going to be class action lawsuits. Oh, yeah. But what often happens with these companies is they get into hot water in the U.S. So they go to Mexico or they go to Japan or they go to China or they go to other places around the world to sell the poisons we sell to the American population. Well, let's hope that they're watching and paying attention to what's happening here and smart enough not to do it. So who vapes? You know, I think that's actually an interesting question. Who vapes?

Well, I know high school kids do, for sure. Well, some do. And is it the anxious kid who vapes? Is it the ADD kid who vapes? Or the ones who want to look cool. Is it the ones who feel vapes? Is it the ADD kid who vapes? Or the ones who want to look cool. The ones who feel like they don't fit in and that will help them fit in. Is it social pressure? Why do you vape?

Because I know people who are listening to us vape and they're sort of irritated with us and we're sorry. And one of the questions I have is, are you vaping because you actually believed that it was better for you? Did you switch from cigarettes to vaping because you bought into the marketing that it was supposed to be better for you? And if so, how sad? Almost one in 20 U.S. adults now uses e-cigarettes. So roughly 10 million Americans. Wow. More than half of them are under the age of 35. One in three e-cigarette users are vaping daily, according to a report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

And e-cigarette use is closely associated with other high-risk behaviors. So I think we should be concerned. Um, so 20 somethings, smokers of traditional cigarettes, unemployed adults are higher. And doesn't that, isn't that odd that they target that population and they're, because they're expensive. Seems so odd. So there are clearly vulnerable groups. And, groups. And it goes back to the question that we often ask, is it good for your brain or bad for it? And I would argue based on the information we have at Amen Clinics that it's bad for it because you're bathing your brain in something that will wear out your pleasure centers that also is a vasoconstrictor.

That means it constricts blood flow to the brain, which makes it harder for oxygen and nutrients to get to every cell in your brain. So stay with us. We're going to talk more about it. Is there one lesson you learned? Post it on any of your social media channels. And we're always grateful. In fact, we'll read a couple of reviews next time. If you leave a review at Apple Podcast or brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, we'll enter you into a raffle to get a signed book of the Brain Warriors Way cookbook. People love that cookbook, including me. Stay with us.

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